Future Shock

There is, however, a radically different way to view people. For example, "one who is moving to a new residence" is a classification into which more than 100,000 Americans fit on any given day, yet they are seldom thought of as a group. The classification "one who is changing his job" or "one who is joining a church," or "one who is getting a divorce" are all based on temporary, transitional conditions, rather than on the more enduring conditions between transitions.

This sudden shift of focus, from thinking about what people "are" to thinking about what they are "becoming," suggests a whole array of new approaches to adaptation.

One of the most imaginative and simplest of these comes from Dr. Herbert Gerjuoy, a psychologist on the staff of the Human Resources Research Organization. He terms it "situational grouping," and like most good ideas, it sounds obvious once it is described. Yet it has never been systematically exploited. Situational grouping may well become one of the key social services of the future.

Dr. Gerjuoy argues that we should provide temporary organizations – "situational groups" – for people who happen to be passing through similar life transitions at the same time. Such situational groups should be established, Gerjuoy contends, "for families caught in the upheaval of relocation, for men and women about to be divorced, for people about to lose a parent or a spouse, for those about to gain a child, for men preparing to switch to a new occupation, for families that have just moved into a community, for those about to marry off their last child, for those facing imminent retirement – for anyone, in other words, who faces an important life change.

"Membership in the group would, of course, be temporary – just long enough to help the person with the transitional difficulties. Some groups might meet for a few months, others might not do more than hold a single meeting."

By bringing together people who are sharing, or are about to share, a common adaptive experience, he argues, we help equip them to cope with it. "A man required to adapt to a new life situation loses some of his bases for self-esteem. He begins to doubt his own abilities. If we bring him together with others who are moving through the same experience, people he can identify with and respect, we strengthen him. The members of the group come to share, even if briefly, some sense of identity. They see their problems more objectively. They trade useful ideas and insights. Most important, they suggest future alternatives for one another."

This emphasis on the future, says Gerjuoy, is critical. Unlike some group therapy sessions, the meetings of situational groups should not be devoted to hashing over the past, or to griping about it, or to soul-searching self-revelation, but to discussing personal objectives, and to pla

In essence, there is nothing novel about this approach. Even now certain organizations are based on situational principles. A group of Peace Corps volunteers preparing for an overseas mission is, in effect, just such a situational grouping, as are pre– and post-natal classes. Many American towns have a "Newcomer's Club" that invites new residents to casserole di

Not all help for the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaptation. In psychiatric jargon a "crisis" is any significant transition. It is roughly synonymous with "major life change."

Today persons in transitional crisis turn to a variety of experts – doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, vocational specialists and others – for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? Who is available to counsel a leader who is up– or down-graded by a reorganization of his or her club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool?

People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by and large, no counseling machinery available to them.

Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more uniform and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. The crisis-caught person went to his priest, his witch doctor or his local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice-givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice.

These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance he needs. By the time help reaches him, he may already have made the crucial decision – and done so badly. So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evermore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people "are" instead of what they are "becoming" we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up.

The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system – a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis himself.

To help tide millions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to "deputize" large numbers of non-professional people in the community – businessmen, students, teachers, workers, and others – to serve as "crisis counselors." Tomorrow's crisis counselors will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other lay people talk out their problems, apprehensions and plans. In return, they will have access toothers for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development.

Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both with considerable respect for privacy and anonymity.

We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of "listening" and "caring" services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be co